History was made in early 2010 when Tomas Sanchez became the very first Garífuna in Guatemala to start blogging. If you are interested in learning about the Garífuna on a deeper level, Garifuna culture and spirituality beyond the tourists' vision, then here is where you need to be. Gain insight into the reality of the Garífunas in Livingston and feel free to leave comments. Thank you for visiting.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Wounded Souls

I was thirty-four years when I became a grandfather. Back in those days it was a taboo here in Labuga for someone at the age of seventeen to be having a baby. Today it is no longer a taboo. It has become an everyday reality, today in Labuga you can find grandparents younger than thirty-four years old.

Today is the 16th of September 2010, and destiny combined with faith brought Malik (my grandson) and I together so we cloud make his first visit ever to Gangadiwali. I was six when my grandfather took me there for the first time, but before I continue, today is exactly a month since I wrote “Born Again” here is an excerpt from the second chapter:

The word “Born” caught my attention this morning; therefore I had to take another look at the meaning before I decided to add the word “Again”. If you and I put these two words together, [born again] something else begins to take place. This has become my favorite concept, “life is a series of relationships”. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably inter-independent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all life.

You see, Malik was born in 1995, at the time his father Tomas Jr. was sixteen and I was living in San Diego, California. I first held Malik in my arms when he was six months old; two years later I started to write a memoir which is thirteen years and one month ago today. However during the past nine years, Malik and I have been going through something like and emotional rollercoaster, it got to the point of wounded souls.

This apparent contradiction is a part of the divine dichotomy, which says that sometimes the only way to ultimately be a thing – in this case, “peaceful”- maybe be, at first, is to not be it! In other words, often the only way to know yourself as That Which You Are is to experience yourself as That Which You are Not.

Allow me to break this down, here is something that I wrote not too long ago, “As a Garifuna I can see a Light at the end of Tunnel”:

Today is April 6th 2010, and Labuga became the light I have been searching for. The word “light” is a relative term also, it may mean something else to you, and on the other hand, the context in which I hope to use it, is very simple.

It is about understanding the difference between doing and being.

It’s about what I am doing or being in Labuga. But before I continue let me tell you that it has taken me quite some time before I became aware of the difference between doing and being. To begin with, when you are doing something, it is like the function of the body, “doing” is a natural tendency for the body, and it is always doing something. The moment it stop doing what it does to keep you alive, your physical life comes to an end.

However, when you are “being”, that is the function of the soul. The soul is forever “being” it is being what it is being, regardless of what the body is doing; it is at this point that you define who you are, because the quality of life hangs in the balance.